In the short term, this is a personal humiliation for him. In the long-term, it could wreck the conservative movement. The US Right is supposed to be big on morality. Compromise with Trump leaves it looking hypocritical and debased.

Anyone who thinks you can’t serve God and Mammon hasn’t seen the Republican Party lately.

It’s true that there have been presidents who have been potty-mouthed or corrupt before. But, in America’s defence, the public didn’t know it at the time, and when they found out – think Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton – Congressmen were swift to suggest impeachment.

Ignorance is no excuse in this case. Trump has talked about flirtation with married women, the merits of flat and ample chests, called wives gold-diggers, detailed his attraction to a 12 year-old Paris Hilton and, we recently discovered, suggestively popped a bottle of champagne over a limo in a soft core porn movie. He leers in plain sight.

Video of him joking about sexual assault won’t drive him out of the race. His ego is too large and his supporters have gone too far with him to retract their endorsements now. Some have suggested that he is a flawed man on the road to redemption. Sean Hannity, a conservative pundit and pal of Trump’s, compared him to King David – who “had five hundred concubines for crying out loud!”

This is a sad thing to see. The religious right has a bad reputation in the UK, but Christian piety has always underpinned American democracy, from the black rights movement to Prohibition. Conservatives have toiled long and honourably to make America into a shining city on a hill.

The reality is that Trump’s bravado camouflages inadequacy. He probably doesn’t have as much money as he says. He almost certainly doesn’t have a plan to beat the Islamists in Syria. He can’t string a coherent thought together.

Those that have backed Trump have argued that while he is personally unlikeable, he is at least right on the issues – that he has come around to their way of thinking on, say, abortion.

But his conversion was late and unconvincing. Worse: they are repeating exactly the same moral compromise that coloured liberal support of Bill Clinton when he was impeached for perjury and obstruction related to his affair with Monica Lewinsky and a suit of sexual harassment.

The great irony of conservative support for Trump is that it will almost certainly put a Clinton back in the White House. On Friday night, when the Trump tape was released, the world ought to have been paying attention to the leaked transcripts of Hillary’s closed-door speeches to Wall Street executives.

Clinton also detailed her vision of a northern hemisphere without borders and argued for European-style healthcare. All of this would have damaged her in an ordinary campaign. But Trump has let her off the hook. The sheer spectacle of his candidacy has eclipsed her mistakes.

If she does win, her opponents on Left and Right will correctly judge that she got to the White House on luck rather than talent. Her election will give her limited political capital. Much of it will be spent on clearing her own name of various charges.

Trump with a Playboy model, 1993.Credit:
Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock

What a depressing state of affairs. American democracy has been hijacked by a political arsonist – a man with little regard for his party or America’s democratic institutions, who has treated the voters in much the same way that he fantasised about treating women. And it was all, I suspect, a fantasy.

It’s worth watching the video in full. He boasts that as a famous man he can kiss and even touch women at will. But when we see him greeted by an attractive TV actress, he doesn’t actually do it. The camera is rolling of course, but why would that stop a true Casanova?

He has raised some good, necessary issues that affect the working-class. But by behaving like a parody, he has turned them into a parody, too.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is left with what? The growing certainty of defeat, a fear that Trump will lose them congressional seats, too. Worse, they have undone their own aspirations to make America a cleaner place. Anyone who thinks you can’t serve God and Mammon hasn’t seen the Republican Party lately.